Inspiron/G-skill Issues!

Hi guys and gals,

I have a Dell Inspiron 1501 Desktop Notebook (2GHz AMD Turion 64 Mobile MK-36, 512MB DDR2, 60GB, DVD/CD-RW, Windows Vista Home Basic, that ran moronically slow because of the lack of RAM. So I got a 1GB stick of this:

[ S A ] G.SKILL DDR2 PC2-4200

M/B Chipset intel 965
CAS_Latency 4-4-4-12
Capacity 512MB (512MB x 1), 1GB (512MB x 2, 1GB x 2), 2GB(1GB x 2)
Speed DDR2-533 (PC2 4200)
Test_Voltage 1.8 Volts
PCB 6 Layers
Registered/Unbuffered Unbuffered
Error_Checking Non-ECC
Type 200-pin SO-DIMM

So I turned off the laptop and grounded myself to the serial? lug on the back of the laptop, and installed the RAM to dimm slot 1, moving the 512mb stick of ram to slot 2.

I then booted up the dell laptop (which I purchased used) and it was all systems go, the pc ran much faster and the "windows experience index" went way up.

Woke up the next morning, and the computer had shut itself off. I go to turn it on, and it fails to resume windows. Repeated attempts fail. I got it to boot a few times by switching the slots that the ram sticks were installed in, but then that stopped working too. So I removed the new g-skill ram and the laptop was stable again.

So I RMA'd the RAM, and the same exact thing just happened again. Worked great the first time, but won't reboot.

I'm new here, and sorry for the long post but I'm really confused here. Did I get the wrong ram for my laptop?

Any ideas? Could an old BIOS version possibly cause this issue?

thanks,
Brent

Well, I would make sure your laptop meets the specs required by the ram. some RAM needs higher voltage to meet the clocks than others. Also, make sure you've memtested the RAM, this is the BEST way to see if the RAM is bad and/or works with your setup. However, that RAM should work just fine.. maybe just a motherboard incompatibility (which BIOS updates fix a lot of time), or bad luck with sticks of memory...

i'm not a pro on ram but the stock ram/motherboard might have EEC or special voltages? or buffered?

the best advice is what he said, try a BIOS update.

How is that computer running an AMD CPU on an Intel chipset?